Fall is here!

I can't help myself. With the first crisp snap in the Fall air, I'm thinking all about the season and what it brings with it. All the colors, smells, and tastes. The family and holidays. I just finished reading the most beautiful depiction of the holidays in Wendell Berry's "Hannah Coulter." So good that I had to go back a read it again! I will post the excerpt for you to read here closer to the holidays.

To officially usher in the start of fall, I decided to celebrate with some fall cookies. I actually found this recipe posted somewhere on the web as a Christmas cookies recipe but it was a perfect excuse to use my maple leaf cookie cutters. And whether it's for fall or spring or Christmas, you can use this recipe with your kids and they will love it!



Painted Sugar Cookies

• 2/3 cp shortening
• 3/4 cp sugar
• 1 tsp lemon or orange zest
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1 egg
• 4 tsp milk
• 2 cp flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt.

Cream the first 4 ingredients. Add the egg and milk. Sift the dry ingredients and then mix to make a batter. Roll out on a floured counter and cut with cutters.

Egg yolk "paint"

for each color you will need to mix the following:

• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tsp water
• food coloring*

Paint the cookies with a new paint brush or one that you have only used for food stuffs before! Then bake at 350 until right before they start to brown. The original recipe, called for piping white icing to define the shapes but I just mixed a little bit of powdered sugar and milk to make a clear glaze. They are delicious leaving them as is. 

*If you are worried they will turn out like a muddy mess resembling those paintings they do at school, only offer colors of the same family that will blend well. 

Red + yellow + orange

blue + green + yellow

blue + red + purple

yellow + blue + green

Hard to Keep Up

It's so hard to keep up with this guy. He gets something in his head and he just can't let it go so I find myself rarely prepared for craft projects and he ends up disappointed when I can't deliver. Not this time. I was unprepared but pulled it off.



 A couple of summers ago, we put together a book of wildflowers that we took on our camera and the boys love it. It was not only a great exercise in flower identification, it serves as a  great resource while hiking the high country in the summers. And we are very proud of our little 3 ring binder with all of our OWN images.

The latest adventure in Aeneas's creativity has been his bug (and critter) book. All summer we have been taking pictures of the critters he has found. We catch a lot, A LOT, of critters, especially when we are camping. So when the boys came back with critters, I got out my camera and started shooting away. Granted some of them were so small it was difficult to get my crummy camera to focus but I snapped away anyway. I actually thought in the back of my mind that he would never remember this project and was trying to figure out how long I should have the random photos take up space on the hard drive.



Well, D sent us a goody box the other day and in it had some insect stickers. Just enough of a tip off to remind him of his little project. I was totally unprepared. I didn't have any of the pictures printed, I didn't have a book to put them in, or the lamination to cover them. I had to think fast and I've found that if I can keep cool and act like this was the plan all along, then the boys tend to just go with it.

So with some cardboard and card stock paper Aeneas and I created this little book. The decorating kept him entertained long enough for me to pick up the pictures the following day. He cut them and stuck them in just the way he wanted to and he has room for more (Oh help me)! He is very proud of this book and looking back, I am quite proud of him myself. And although the stubbornness and insistence of this kid drive me to insanity at times, there are good things that happen on account of it. I'm just trying hard to keep up! Good job little buddy.

"Why is Sex Fun"

What have you been reading lately?!?! Have you heard of Jarred Diamond? If not, have you heard of the books "Guns, Germs and Steel," or " Collapse"? I have one of those husbands that has actually made up a reading list for me in the past which has opened my eyes to things like "The Aeneid," "All the Kings Men," "The River Why" "Mere Christianity" and most recently, "Why is Sex Fun?" After he found me reading some dumb totally predictable novel that I picked up in my 15 seconds out the door of the library, he said he had better.

So he comes home with "Why is Sex Fun." As a remarkable writer and truly brilliant Anthropological Biologist, Jarred Diamond attempts to answer questions like:

• Why are humans the only mammals to have a hidden ovulatory cycle?
• WTH is with the whole post copulatory desertion with other animals and some men's neccesity to do the same? 
• What's the added benefit for those men to stick around for the long run of child rearing?
• Why do women go through menopause when very few other animals do so?
• How did woman and men become attracted to certain aspects of our physique? 

One of my favorite chapters is titled "Making more by making less:The evolution of female menopause"

He speaks about oral tradition in some of our native cultures around the world. And how even though women past their prime in child bearing are no longer contributing to the passing on of genes through childbirth, they offer wisdom and guidance that contributes to our survival. His examples detailed the elderly who knew the plants that one could eat during an extreme famine despite their lack of taste. And then goes on to say that in our 1st world societies today, we rarely need such with the help of the internet.

I have spent the last 5 days cutting and prepping and putting up applesauce. A truly exhausting endeavor to say the least. One of my good friends and mentors, Nellie, came by to help me for a few hours. And just talking and watching her cut apples taught me more than I could have ever learned by an internet search. Sure I could have gotten the recipes, the canning times and temps, the jar sterilization techniques from a webpage somewhere in the web cloud, however, nowhere online could have or would have demonstrated the best way to cut those apples, a technique I learned by simply watching and which in the end saved me hours of time. Observation made me twice as fast! There's something to that.

After reading the book and more specifically, the last chapter, "Truth in Advertising: The evolution of body signals," I also began to reflect some about what sorts of things I found attractive in a male. And interestingly enough, some of them were quite simple. The ability to provide for the family, not so much monetarily as much as ability to survive in the wild. Would he know what to do in an emergency? Would he be cool and collected under pressure? Would he have good marksmanship with any number of tools and weapons? Reasonable and thoughtful and intelligent in a liberal arts sort of way. Ability to solve problems with his body and intellect. A man that has both strength and endurance and a nurturing mentality to provide for and protect the next generation. An ability to keep home the safest and most relaxing place to retreat to.

So I worked with some computer people and some math people and some Excel pros along with some sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, doctors and such to create an algorithm and computer program that you could basically input your preferences and it would spit out a good match for you. Here was the result:

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

Ha! I guess I didn't do so bad! READ IT. It's fascinating! Buy it here.

Abundant Autumn Apples, by Anna

With close to 200 lbs of apples and 5 days of running 3 crockpots, a huge stew pot and a canner nonstop you too can have 8 gallon freezer bags plus 36 quarts of canned applesauce, 5 apple hand pies, and a baked apple french toast! The boys quote of the weekend? "Put me to work, Mom!" We've been busy! I love this time of year. I don't know what we would do if we actually owned our own apple tree! Thank you Fort Lewis College!

Simple Weekend Treats

We made mini cinnamon rolls last weekend. They kids did them completely by themselves and were so proud. Try them with your little guys, they are easy peasy!




Mini Cinnamon Rolls

• Crescent Rolls
• Butter 
• Cinnamon
• Sugar
• Maple Syrup
• Powdered Sugar

Unroll the Crescent rolls and pinch together all of the seams. Brush melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Roll them up starting at the long end. Slice and put them sideways into a mini muffin pan. Bake as directed on the package maybe for just 8-10 min.  Cut in 2 Tbsp butter into 1 cup powdered sugar, add about 3 tbsp maple syrup and then milk to make it smooth. Spread the icing over top while they are still warm. Walla!

Learning the Ropes

Patrick is getting a bit of coaching on how to
hold your break on the way down

Durango has lots of rocks to climb on if you are just getting your feet wet. Justin used to climb waaaaayyyy back in his college days, so we decided it would be fun to get the boys into it a little and to prep them for the Doony and Sheels Summer Climbing Camp in the future. We bought a full body harness and have explored a couple different places around town. Turtle Lake is great for bouldering. Nothing we did was so high we needed ropes, but high enough that we could practice repelling and climbing on a rope. X-Rock has some pretty big cliff faces that we were able to explore. Backing over that edge to repel is the worst part but the boys didn't seem to mind it much. They were naturals!

Patrick has got the hang of it as long as we can keep the
crazy hair out of the figure 8!

With barely enough weight to counter the friction, Aeneas has
to work a little harder to get down.

No problem. This kid isn't afraid of anything!

And since we didn't get enough of heights, we went to DMR and did
the bungee where Aeneas has gained enough confidence to do flips!

Brothers race to the top of the climbing wall at DMR.

Aeneas's flip. I've got to do a few lessons for the videographer ;)

Patrick had a 5 flip pass. He's been taking notes from the bungee guys on how to do it. No video of it unfortunately. Bummer.

Mama even got a flip or two in!

(not so good on the stomach, crazy dizzy!)